Thinking Outside the Box: A Misguided Idea

Although studying creativity is considered a legitimate scientific discipline nowadays, it is still a very young one. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle. He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution. In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century.

If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots.

At the first stages, all the participants in Guilford’s original study censored their own thinking by limiting the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square (even those who eventually solved the puzzle). Even though they weren’t instructed to restrain themselves from considering such a solution, they were unable to “see” the white space beyond the square’s boundaries. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.

The symmetry, the beautiful simplicity of the solution, and the fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford and the readers of his books to leap to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral (via 1970s-era media and word of mouth, of course). Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box.

Management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves. Because they hadn’t, they were obviously not as creative or smart as they had previously thought, and needed to call in creative experts. Or so their consultants would have them believe.

The nine-dot puzzle and the phrase “thinking outside the box” became metaphors for creativity and spread like wildfire in marketing, management, psychology, the creative arts, engineering, and personal improvement circles. There seemed to be no end to the insights that could be offered under the banner of thinking outside the box. Speakers, trainers, training program developers, organizational consultants, and university professors all had much to say about the vast benefits of outside-the-box thinking. It was an appealing and apparently convincing message.

Indeed, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams—Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg—ran another experiment using the same puzzle but a different research procedure.

Both teams followed the same protocol of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the dot array. In other words, the “trick” was revealed in advance. Would you like to guess the percentage of the participants in the second group who solved the puzzle correctly? Most people assume that 60 percent to 90 percent of the group given the clue would solve the puzzle easily. In fact, only a meager 25 percent did.

What’s more, in statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement over the subjects of Guilford’s original study is insignificant. In other words, the difference could easily be due to what statisticians call sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at these surprising results. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help.

That this advice is useless when actually trying to solve a problem involving a real box should effectively have killed off the much widely disseminated—and therefore, much more dangerous—metaphor that out-of-the-box thinking spurs creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth.

Of course, in real life you won’t find boxes. But you will find numerous situations where a creative breakthrough is staring you in the face. They are much more common than you probably think.

There are many theories of creativity. What the latest experiment proves is not that creativity lacks any association to thinking outside-the-box, but that such is not conditioned by acquired knowledge, i.e., environmental concerns. For example, there have been some theories such as those of Schopenhauer (see his remarks about Genius) and Freud (see his remarks about Sublimation) that propose creativity is something more like a capacity provided by nature rather than one acquired or learned from the environment. Rather than disproving the myth, in other words, the experiment might instead offer evidence that creativity is an ability that one is born with, or born lacking, hence why information from the environment didn't impact the results at all. It's an interesting experiment, but the author's conclusion cannot possibly follow from the results of it.

I conduct soft skills training and outbound training for Corporates and individuals . To enhance creativity we motivate the participants to approach the problems from variety of vantage points . Even repeatedly checking the boundary conditions we are able to come up with variety of ways of solving the problem . This is akin to checking the walls of the box . Looking inside the box for additional information , additional resources also helps . Looking at the box from bird's eye view triggers some different creative solutions . Let us not get tied down to the mechanics but free ourselves to find the solution . I will give an example . You are playing football with family and friends at a distant ground and someone gets bruised badly . No first aid kit is available . Your priority is to get the person to a hospital ( at a distance of 2 hours ) . The wound is bleeding and needs to be kept clean and bacteria free till the person reaches the hospital . What will you do ? Think of a solution . It is quite close to you .

With all due respect, Professor Boyd, your argument is not at all compelling. It seems that you are taking the "thinking outside the box" (TOTB) metaphor much more literally than it is intended (or, at least, as I and may others infer). Let me point out a few false and/or negligent statements that you make:

1. To refer to TOTB as "dangerous" is naive, at best. I, personally, have seen the positive, tranformative effects of not only the 9-dots exercise, but also the occasional use of the term to remind individuals after-the-fact about the value of thinking differently.

2. The experiment you refer to doesn't even come close to proving what you suggest that it does. To use the term "proving" in an argument like this is laughable.

3. In real life, you absolutely WILL find boxes...that is, if you understand what the term "box" refers to. Here, the term is not literal; rather, it refers to a mindset, a perspective, a belief, or an assumption. It is precisely how the human mind works. We all think in boxes all the time. The "sin," if you will, is not in thinking inside of a box...but the neglect to readily switch from one box to another, nimbly (see Alan Iny's new book, "Thinking in New Boxes").

A different -- and very healthy, positive, and productive -- way to think about TOTB is to understand that it merely represents an insight that can remind an individual to consciously become aware of limiting assumptions. And, upon such awareness, to open ones mind and imagination to actively explore new possibilities beyond the obvious or initial answer. If you don't regard this as valid contribution to creativity, then I suggest you consider spending a bit more time outside of that "box" that you've presented here.

I think much of which is vaguely labeled "creative thinking" is actually the result of healthy skepticism. We should make a habit of challenging conventional wisdom and the way things have always been done. On encountering the conventional approach, our attitude should be doubtful: "Well, that might be right, but I will have to think about it."